USB 3.0: more updates to make you gasp or gag over, in no particular order.

If you haven’t read already, USB 3.0 is all the rage these days. Speculating to hit store shelves by mid 2009 now, there has been a lot of information to hit the blogosphere lately, and I plan to put it all together like a big USB 3.0 Sandwitch.

First, Engadget reported some neat information about the lifeline of USB 3.0: The spec is designed to last the next 5 years, with room to plans to be able to push up to 25 gigabytes per second over a hypothetical optical connection, according to Intel’s Jeff Ravencraft. — This sounds great, but what did CES ’09’s benchmarks show us? keep reading!

Second, Techradar reported that Seagate would be the first to demo USB 3.0 at CES ‘09. They used a Seagate FreeAgent drive using a Symwave-built USB 3.0 Controller.

Finally on to the benchmarks! TGDaily updated from CES ‘09 to explain that while USB 3.0 is stated to allow 5000 Mb/s (625MB/s) transfer speeds, initial devices may not see half of that, possibly only 1/4th of the maximum speeds. — This is actually acceptable in my opinion, since the jump from USB 1.0 to USB 2.0 was drastic (and awesome), and it happened using basically the same connection, it may take some time for the manufacturers and developers to really push USB 3.0 to it’s limits. Also as TGDaily reports, USB 2.0’s 480 Mb/s promise took years to be fully utilized from the about 250 Mb/s you were getting when it first broke out on the market.

According to TGDaily’s report, a protype USB 3.0 HardDrive (most likely Seagates, but no mention of the manufacturer) was benchmarked at 1320Mb/s, or about 165 MB/s while doing READ functions, and 1000Mb/s (125 MB/s) during WRITE functions. They expect it to probably start with an average of about 150 MB/s once it’s out on the market, which is still over 2x the speed of USB 2.0, so while this is a bit of a bummer, all told we will be pleased with the results coming later this year

image courtesy of Engadget.